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The following program is a fictional story. While certain characters may bear a resemblance to or be based on actual people, this is a piece of art and does not claim to represent or impersonate any real-life person. While some of the events portrayed may be based on real-life events, they are not meant to be an accurate depiction of historical or current news events.
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A Next Day, an Afrofuturist series by J.L. Roberts.
green.
When she tells this story, which is every chance she gets, she loves to throw her head back and say, I called it.
I don’t know how I couldn’t see it, how I still held on to that last naive shred of hope until the day a bomb landed on the White House. Kamala winning will not change anything, I told them. We need to get to work.
I’m probably only still alive because Karen said she liked my style when I told her that her breath smelled bad.
I would want someone to tell me. I blurted out immediately after seeing the horror on her face. And then I overheard you saying that you liked that girl and I didn’t want you to have bad breath if you were going to go over and talk to her.
then you breathed in my face when you were passing me in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. Then I opened a pack of gum and handed her a stick.
turned and went back to the bar to finish my crossword puzzle. AJ built the whole thing is what she always says next because she thinks it makes her sound humble.
But I’m the one who made them get their head out of the crossword puzzle clouds and get moving on building Giovanni’s room. She won’t even read the book, I sometimes chime in. She thinks it’s too sad. She’s got no problem predicting the fall of the US empire, but somehow David leaving Giovanni in that room in Paris is too much for her. I did build it. I had been building it my whole life in my mind’s eye.
from a palimpsest that the USA had tried to convince me was the stain of error. Being the only one to see and know a world, having to recreate it from scraps of hope and love and vulnerability as the only palpable universe you’ve ever known hunts you and contorts itself before falling down and dying, that is the hardest and saddest thing I have ever done. But she was right. Nothing did change.
that it would have if Trump had won. And all of the thinking and considering and processing I had done turned into a place where we could all go and be, and most importantly, where we could live.
I hadn’t decided that I wanted to live when she approached me toward the end of the night. She was a little boring in the end, she said, climbing onto the stool next to me. But at least my breath didn’t smell like a sack of assholes, so thanks. ⁓ you’re welcome, I replied, not looking up from the page. I was doing a Saturday puzzle, the most annoying and pretentious. You know,
I thought you might have been flirting with me in some twisted heteronormative internalized misogyny kind of way. And then I remembered the kebab I had for dinner and the espresso martini. I put my finger up to signify that I needed a moment. I was digging deep into the vault of whiteness to find the phrase, goes gaga. The clue flips over. She waited a moment and then said, did you just put your finger up to shush me?
I was writing out G-A-G-A. No, I put my finger up to let you, the person who approached me and started talking to me without first making sure that I was available for a conversation, know that I needed a moment, but that I’d be with you shortly. I’m done now. So she was boring, you said? She stared for a moment. You do know that you’re in a bar on a Thursday night, right?
Conversation is kind of implied in the whole atmosphere. You do know that it’s customary to actually get someone’s attention and make sure that they are paying attention to you before you start a conversation, right? The shock contracted the surprise muscles around her eyes. And no, I don’t think conversation with an infinite number of strangers is implied in the atmosphere of a bar. Sometimes I read or do crosswords.
Sometimes I crochet. You come to a bar to crochet? Sometimes, yes. Usually not at night. It’s too dark to see the stitches then. You are the oddest, she chuckled.
But you know what else you are? More entertaining than that chick was. ⁓ yes, you were saying she was boring. So boring. This is the most riveting conversation I’ve had all night with someone I didn’t have to tip. You could tip me if you wanted. Now I think I was pseudo flirting, but only perfunctorily so. She laughed loudly. I like your style. I looked down at my clothes, black jeans, black
tank, black blazer, hidden suspenders. So the world is ending and you’re sitting alone in a bar doing crossword puzzles. I’m not alone. I was talking to Sam. I gestured to the bartender who was cleaning glasses and contemplating Saran wrapping the fruit. Aha, so you agree that the world is ending. A world is ending, sure. At least I hope it is.
It seems to threaten this every hundred years or so,
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But I do hope it has finally run its course. I see, a nihilist. I mean, not really. It’s more like I’m a double Capricorn who’s ruled by their Venus and Pisces. A Pisces Venus? So you’re going to save us all. You got ideas in there. You’ve dreamt us a whole new world five different times. You’re living in it already. Sure am. At this bar with this crossword puzzle on a Thursday night.
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she laughed loudly again, this time touching my knee when she brought her head forward and swallowed her teeth back into her mouth.
You’re a bit of a nihilist yourself, I said, ignoring the knee touch. Yes, but I’m the good kind. ⁓ good, me too.
I smiled.
This was the most riveting conversation I had had all day too, or even all week.
but I had been here before. The chat that leads nowhere, the realization that the person is actually not the quote, good kind of nihilist. When a world is ending, you’re bound to have a conversation like this several times a week, more.
as the end approaches. So what’s your plan for the end of the world, Venus and Pisces?
Well, first I have to decide if I even want to keep going.
I find this world to be a really lonely place. ⁓ a depressive nihilist. No, just the oddest person I know in this world. Odd is lonely here. But who will I have riveting conversations with if you don’t come along to the next world?
⁓ I think you’ll be plenty riveted. Newness is always riveting. True. Okay, so if you decide to grace us with your presence in the future, what does it look like? What’s your plan for saving us? A room. A room? Well, not one room, but the same kind of room replicated over and over again. A network of rooms, I guess. I’m listening.
She was listening now. She seemed to put down her dictionary of witty quips and her need to find someone to fuck tonight all at once. She put her left elbow on the bar, palmed her cheek, and cocked her head to the side.
It was like she was waiting for story hour to begin, like she didn’t yet know that stories are stories. You want anything for last call?
Sam appeared in front of us. I’ll have one for the road, I said. Want me to add the cinnamon and star anise again? Absolutely, we are geniuses. Anything for you? Sam looked over at Karen and then at me and then Karen again. Just a water, no ice. Thanks a lot, Sam. Sam nodded and walked away.
What drink is that with cinnamon and anise? It’s just something Sam and I made up, you know, for the end of the world. so you’re friends? No, I just met them tonight. And you just made up a drink? Yeah, why not? So the room? A room, yes. Not the room. Okay, A room.
Brown. We haven’t had Karens for a long time now. The white woman massacre took care of that.
care of our messes and they take care of theirs. That’s what Karen says. We’ve had our share of problems too and we gave our people a choice. There is one group of men who got a few women to go with them. They chose to be with whites rather than give up misogyny.
Some women tried to come back three months later when they realized that they’d spend the rest of their lives as slaves. When they chose to leave, a condition was that they were prohibited from coming back.
and then when Samira showed up pregnant with a baby of a man who had raped her after he killed her, quote, husband, as she called him, we voted to establish a next day room.
Karen volunteered to be with her and I would go a few times a week to check on them. And then Angela came. Then Leela, dragging two scared former whites with her. Initially, we established a separate next day room for each of them.
someone always volunteered to stay with a new one. We could feel a violence and trauma coming off of them. And I think it reminded us all of before.
of what we had to endure to escape a disease of whiteness. Samira is featured in Karen’s telling of Giovanni’s room, though her name is omitted.
This scared little one showed up three days after we buried Tanisha. And AJ said we shifted dimensions, but I think we all just wanted a quick fix to a guilt shame
That cropped up in some of us. I think it was a little bit of both. I’m still not sure that I subscribe to a belief that shame cannot grow into a shift. Sometimes I’m not sure that this semantic relationship
or a next one is an evolution. I was tending to Nisha’s tree when a bloom came to me, an idea that is. This story will probably be considered propaganda, whichever way I
And we teach as many dimensions as we can manage in schools here. And I hope this is making some sense to you.
I’m not as fluent in whiteness languages as I used to be, and I know that there are many new ones every day. It is a prolific disease is what we call them. It is not my intention to offend. I will attempt to include a general whiteness to people translator when this text is sent out.
Samira came onto land that we were occupying and was escorted to a main room. At that time, there were three and we asked people to convene in their respective main rooms and we projected her into all of them. She had forgotten a lot of our ways by then. Some others had shifted since her departure. She began speaking immediately and she was looking down at the ground for quite a while so when she finally stopped,
She thought it odd how long we had all been silent for. And then when she did remember our meditative pause, she apologized profusely. And this to her may have felt like a slowing of a process. She had after all been gone to a dimension of rigid time space for two of my local seasons. One gauge of people who seem to have acclimated to our ways of being and people who maybe
are in their work is who laughs externally when Karen says,
She began talking immediately when the meeting began and who does not. Urgency is a symptom of whiteness that many struggle to heal
seems to live deep inside, sometimes resurfacing during times of relatively increased dimensional chaos. We do have what we currently call
time important moments, by the way. This declaration is made by people that have demonstrated trust and who agree to do their best to honor the cycles of others. I say this so that you know that we have many kinds of time among people
we have, I believe, a kind of time that whiteness possesses and uses. I think we may operate in that way much less frequently, though.
The time you have is the time you need is a phrase that prevails most often over choosing to label a moment time important. We elect time important moments, for example, during these comings where Karen tells this story of how she interprets our becoming, a birth of a room, Giovanni’s room. We move in that way in these moments.
because we are aware of a language barrier. These meetings are usually with former whites, those who have said that they would like to heal themselves of whiteness and who are learning different ways of thinking about time and space and humanity and belonging. We use these words too in these meetings because whites and former whites seem to struggle with our ways of speaking and being. And we wish to help them feel welcome and open. Karen tells her story,
as though our roles were reversed in that bar, as though it was I who leaned on the bar that night, ready for a story from her. She tells it that way because it is a story of hers now. Ownership and belonging are other struggles that seem to be lifelong around a whiteness disease. Since agreeing to a next day room though, belonging is showing itself to be less difficult to eradicate.
People feel safer when they are free to explore alternatives without fear that they will be prohibited from return. I find it very interesting to observe dispositions of former whites when Karen gets into her history lesson on what was called America after the 2024 election. They lived a version of it as we all did, but different actions that former whites took and different impacts of Project 2025
on individual former whites
seemed to play like a television show in their energy outputs, their faces, and in muscular and gestural languages spoken by their bodies.
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Karen uses the old words, racism, classism, prejudice, oppression.
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It is surprising how many of them still do not know about the Holocaust attempts on Black people, queer and trans people, Indigenous people, the kidnapping and torture of children. Most whites with trans children hid them when they could with gender-appropriate clothing. Many of the children didn’t understand, went to school, talked, and were taken anyway. Karen tells a story
about when they stopped pretending that the goal was to rehabilitate them, about the day a colonel came to the school to rape a trans girl out of her affliction.
They called them reminding sessions. There is a hot and cold silence during this part of the history. They used bullshit scientific jargon to convince many parents and teachers that transness was an epigenetic psychological illness. They said that the bodies and minds of the children only needed to be reminded of their true nature over the course of several months to a year.
depending on how long the child had spent in an unnatural state.
They burned the books, the images, erased all of the media in existence that portrayed queerness, transness, melanated skin, and non-Judeo-Christian iconography. I started the Giovanni’s Room underground library five years before, never imagining that things would go that far. The week of the fires was the first time I died, the first time I remember anyway.
The air was more poisonous than usual and the clouds of smoke from the CDs and motherboards and the cellophane wrappers from the books and acrylic paints and canvases, it didn’t clear for almost four months. At first, I thought it was the toxic smog that had killed me. It wiped out more than half of the neighborhoods in the most populated areas in the first eight days.
The cities and towns had shut off the air filtration systems once the power grids overloaded, and only the residents with the most money were supplied with clean air to breathe in their homes. Everyone else was wearing their KN380 devices nonstop, but then the stores ran out of extra filters, and the ones that were available were marked up to 40 times the usual price so that nobody could afford them. Police with military-grade weapons
killed the would-be looters. I remember there being a commercial blast sent out to our phones around then, where Ohpra Winfall and Dr. Phyllis, Jay and Bay and Julia Robertson, Ellen Pompeya and the Okamans were promising free devices for children under the age of 17. Parents were to report to centers in major metropolitan zones with their children to have them medically checked before the devices would be distributed to healthy youth.
after a quarantine period. Two days after the program began, was another round of bombings. In this one, the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building fell, and three quarters of the parents never saw their children again. None of the quarantine facilities themselves were hit, only the surrounding zones. But when one father finally managed to
crawl through the rubble to reach the entrance of the building where he had dropped off his child, he was told that the children had been moved for safety. Roman, the distraught father, was Tanisha’s husband, and he never stopped looking for their little girl. He died in a bombing three months later, along with Julia Robertson, hours after they had managed to send out a video
reporting that they were close to finding out where the children from the facilities had been taken and asking the public for help identifying a photo of a building with a plastic dome over it and an unusual water tower inside. The photo was scrubbed from our phones shortly after, but not before it was downloaded to the air-gapped archive at Giovanni’s room. Ohpra Winfall, Jay and Bay, and the Okamans’ faces
were the last black faces ever seen in any media. And though nobody knows their whereabouts to this day, we still use the commercial to teach the youth in our schools about the land that was once called the United States of America, about television, media, celebrity, and corruption, and how whiteness diseases are not necessarily specific to skin tone. Ellen is in room four.
She has taken over as Jackari’s mother since Tanisha died. I fear that she will be fighting the guilt shame bug of what happened to Miela for a season or two yet. When I woke up, I was still wearing my KN380 mask device. I was lying on a cot in Giovanni’s room and Karen was sitting on a chair in the corner writing out a new batch of recipe books. This was one of my
But Karen’s handwriting is a close second best, even though her dominant hand is her right.
don’t take it off until Sam has a look at you, she said.
As I pulled the mask down and let it drop to the floor, there was blood all over your head. So I didn’t want to risk you getting anything in your eyes or your mouth. I sat up quickly. Whoa, let’s have a meditative pause.
I stood up and walked over to the mirror on the wall. I felt fine, more than fine.
I think you have a head wound. Please, AJ. Karen walked quickly over to catch me. She was sure I would fall over. I did not. My head was covered in blood, though. Mostly not my own, I could tell. I felt around on my head for the source of the injury.
But all I found was a couple of slightly softer spots in my skull, almost like what newborns have. Kara is dead, I said.
As I brought my hands back down to my side, a vision of her death came into my head, clearly,
But as though it were far away at the same time. As though it had happened.
to someone else. Yeah, I found her. She was, you had your arms wrapped around her. You tried to save her.
The others are preparing her body and the seedling now. Jackari chose a biwa tree Room four is struggling. Dani, I need to get to her. I turned and moved toward the door.
AJ, you’re not yourself. You can’t go out there until you’ve been looked at and decontaminated. Sam will be back. Just then Sam opened the door and Karen grabbed my waist and pulled me backward so that I wouldn’t be hit by the boxes of supplies in Sam’s hands. Whoa, love, look at you. Sam put the boxes on the table. You’re right dirty, aren’t you? The British accent, the scent of star anise, cinnamon.
filled my nostrils.
(24:56)
That was part one of a next day, an Afrofuturist story that I started writing before the 2024 election. Really, I started writing it because it was a way for me to feel less helpless and hopeless about the future. And before publishing this, I thought about changing it to reflect what actually happened. But then I realized that in a lot of ways, it really didn’t feel like it mattered. So I’ve kept it as it is.
This story is about the creation of Giovanni’s Room, an Afrofuturist creative community that I have just launched. And it is meant to be interactive.
is meant to help us collectively imagine and dream our way to a new reality.
I think that as we do what we can to push back against fascism, against the atrocities that we are seeing being perpetrated globally.
lot of us are forgetting the power of creativity.
creativity is the soul of revolution.
Part of the reason that we don’t know what to do is that we have not imagined another way of being. Capitalism
white supremacy, patriarchy is all that we have ever known. And so as we resist, as we collectively dream, it is really important that we stretch ourselves beyond the bounds of what we believe is possible.
is one of the ways that we will find ourselves in the realities we seek to belong to.
So I’m not only inviting, but I’m encouraging audience participation as the story unfolds. If you have ideas of what should happen next, plot points, characters that you want to see, please submit them to our email address, which is Giovanni’s Room, gcc at gmail.com. Again, that’s Giovanni’s Room.
gcc for grassroots creative community at gmail.com.
I really look forward to co-creating this with you
and hearing your ideas of what a matriarchal and less hierarchical and capitalistic society could look like for us.
So join me next week for part two and I’m really excited to be embarking on this journey with you.